Overheating/Condensation issues

[daffy_duck_nj]

(cross posted from phandroid forums)

I'm posting this for my dad. His Slider got into some overheating and condensation issues. Apparently he had it too long inside his thin jacket, in a shirt pocket located above his left side. He was trying to use it while on the bus, and there was a message saying that the phone had overheated. A couple of passengers tried to help him out, and they determined that he had to turn it off for a while.

Once home, we plugged the charger on it to try to charge the battery. Meanwhile, I tried rebooting it a few times, including getting into recovery. The phone seems glitchy, so there's really not much use for it at the moment. Also, when it boots to Android, it has the Safe Mode indicator lit up at the bottom left of the screen.

At the moment, I've taken out the battery and the cover. I also have the keyboard pulled out (but not disassembled) in an attempt to dry out the phone. Any idea as to how long this usually takes? If the worst case comes about, I could rework my Kyocera Event, unroot that phone, and let him use it on his VM account.

I also told him this is why I rarely store my phone inside a jacket. About the only time I do this is during the winter, especially with the weather we had in the Northeast US (thanks polar vortex). I usually store mine in the pants pocket. None of my phones have overheated because of that, unless some rogue app suddenly eats memory and/or CPU cycles. Still, nothing as worse as my dad just experienced.

 

[zedorda]

It likely shorted out do to condensation which caused the overheating. Human body heat can't over heat a phone before the person dies from fever. The heat had to be generated from the phone.

 

[daffy_duck_nj]

At least it wasn't immersed in any water, so I'm just giving it a few hours to dry out. The screen comes on, and the bit of moisture that appeared on a corner was nearly gone. I quickly checked it (less than 5 minutes), and the phone seemed less erratic. The Safe Mode indicator wasn't on, so I'm hoping the phone will be recoverable. I don't think I'll need to bury the phone (minus battery and SD card) inside a bowl of rice. Should I still do that?

 

[zedorda]

Submersion in raw white rice will hasten the drying.

 

[daffy_duck_nj]

Guess we got lucky here. The phone sat around for a full day, with all of the easily removable contents in pieces.

Phone booted up, and battery read at 80%. Figured that was correct, as he is a light user of his phone. QWERTY keyboard works, too. (I'm not good at using that anymore...) Touchscreen does seem a bit less responsive, but it's working. No more booting into Safe Mode automatically. Stock recovery is accessible. SD card is OK.

I still have my Kyocera Event ready to go, unrooted, just in case. I previously had that rooted, so at least it's free of most of the bloatware, but it works well without them. If we have to change phones, at least I won't have to install a lot of stuff. Mostly facebook, NYTimes, minutes checker... about ten apps, but anyway. We'll see how this turns out in the next few days.

 

[scanf]

"Human body heat can't over heat a phone before the person dies from fever", lol is not what was alleged but keeping any computer device in a covered where it can't radiate heat will cause it to overheat.